In many cases the individual participants to a video conference session do not know or recognize each other. Typically, this requires some sort of introduction period at the start of the video conference. Alternatively, interruptions for the purpose of identifying a participant may occur during the video conference session. A participant may want to interact with another participant, for example, to privately ask a question to someone who was just speaking in the meeting, or to start an instant messaging (IM) session with that person to privately discuss the issue before sharing it with everybody in the conference. In either scenario, interruptions or introductions for the purpose of sharing identity information are time consuming, inconvenient, and disruptive to normal meeting discussions.